In the constant pursuit of learning and improving myself, I’ve discovered that going through books is a great way to expand my knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. I’m going to keep this post open and update it with each new book I read.

Book List Category: Fiction

In this Vue.js tutorial, we are gonna take a deep dive and look at the lifecycle hooks provided from the Vue framework.

Now, we’re going to analyze the lifecycle diagram, and then go and implement this into a Vue application. We’re also going to extend it, because this lifecycle set of hooks and what they list in the documentation is helpful for understanding, because it’s a helpful visual. But I think that it’s missing a couple of elements that I personally have had to implement into my own production Vue applications, and so I think it will help for you to see those as well. So we’re gonna walk through quite a bit of material in this guide.

So I have a Vue application running right here in the background, and we’re going to be looking primarily just at a few different components. So we’re going to be looking at a dashboard component, a Vue component right here, and then that has the nested login component.

And so what we’re gonna be doing isn’t as much building in this guide, we’re instead gonna be looking and analyzing to see how exactly the lifecycle process works.

If you are not aware of this, if you’ve never heard of the lifecycle, or if you’re just trying to understand it for the first time, the best analogy that helped me is trying to compare a Vue component to us humans.

So as a human, we are born, we go through different stages in life, and then, even though it may seem dark, we all die at some point. Well, that’s the way a Vue component works too. A Vue component is born. We say that a Vue component is created, then it has a number of things happen. It has changes go on, such as data changes, and updates, and those kinds of. And then at a certain time, it also dies, or we say that it is destroyed.

So what we can do with Vue is we can actually listen for and capture those events, each one of those, from created all the way through destroyed, and then update the application based on the state of the component.

So hopefully that starts to make sense. But what really help understand the lifecycle hooks and the entire process was really just getting in and implementing each one of the methods.

I’ll provide in the show notes a link to this documentation, ’cause that can help to have a visual. But I think what helps the most is just going in and writing the code.

So I’m going to switch back to our application here, and then opening up Visual Studio code here, you can see that we have our homepage component, which is just rendering out some content, and then our login component. And that’s pretty much it. That’s pretty basic right now.

So we’re gonna start in the dashboard, and I’m gonna go out, and I’m gonna start listing some of these hooks. Now, right now we have a pretty basic setup where we have our data function, then we have a list of the components that we are registering, and then we have one custom method. I usually by convention place these lifecycle hooks right above the methods, I like to have my methods at the very bottom, so I know exactly where they’re at. But you could technically put these anywhere inside of the script tag, as long as it’s right after the default curly braces.

Now, I’m going to just list off a couple basic ones here first. So I’m gonna say beforeCreate(), and it is a regular method, so you have to have the parens right after it. And then I’m going to console.log and then say beforeCreate, just so we know exactly what’s happening here. And then for this one, I’m also gonna say this afterwards, ’cause this can be really helpful in understanding what we’re referencing. And then make sure you put a comma there. And then after that say created.

Now, unlike some other methods or names inside of Vue, these are reserved words. So before create is something provided by Vue directly. Created is something provided by Vue. So these are reserved and they are names and functions that are built directly into the Vue source code.

I’m going to copy this console log here, and then change this to say created. And I’m not gonna pass in this or else it’ll make the output a little bit messy, and you’ll notice that the this that it’s referencing is gonna be the same for all these elements.

So let’s just start with these two, and then we’ll get into some of the other ones after this. So switching back to the browser, I’m going to clear the output, hit refresh, and now you can see that we have some console log statements here. We have before create, and then created. So both of these worked. So they were triggered. Notice that we didn’t do anything. All we did was we listed them out inside of the component.

Now, when I used the this call, so when I said beforeCreate and then passed in this, all this is doing is giving a reference to this component, meaning the dashboard component. And the way we can know that is this is an object. And so if I click on here, I can see everything inside of it, everything that has reference too. So you can see it has a list of attributes. So if I click on attributes, you can see it’s an object, and then inside of here all kinds of different object values.

Then this one is the one I think is pretty neat and very helpful is children. You can that our dashboard component does have two children. You can even just go and reference them here. We have a homepage content component, and then a login component. And that is what this is referencing here. And then it has a element so that we know that it’s a diversity. You can hover over it, and you can see what the element entails, it can have listeners, you can have a list and a reference to its parent.

So that is kind of a helpful way of understanding what this is. I want this guide to specifically focus on the lifecycle components, but I just put that in there just so you can see that you have a reference, you have a direct reference to this inside of each one of these lifecycle hooks.

So you saw that these were already triggered. Let’s move down. I’m also gonna get rid of this and clear it out, just so we have some nice clean output.

Now I’m gonna go and I’m gonna list all the rest of the lifecycle methods that we have access to. So the next one’s gonna be mounted. And then the one after mounted … or actually, you know what, I forgot one. There is one right before it called beforeMount. And so we have access to beforeMount here, then mounted.

And then from there we have our update methods. So this one is going to be beforeUpdate. And there’s gonna be something a little bit tricky with the update method that I’m gonna show you here in a second. Then the next one is updated.

So we have updated, and then we just have two more. So we’re going to have our beforeDestroy, and then we’re gonna have after that one our destroy, beforeDestroy, and then destroyed.

I do like the naming that they went with here. If anyone has ever been through my tutorial for the React lifecycle hooks, React went with a little bit more challenging of a naming process, and it makes it a little bit harder to remember all of them. But Vue, I really like the names that they went with, because you can pretty much, as long as you can remember half of them, that means you have remembered all of them. You have beforeCreate, created, beforeMounted, mounted, beforeUpdate, updated, beforeDestroy, and then destroy. That’s a very kind of a common approach to being able to name them. So you just have to memorize about four items, and then you’ll know all of them.

So now that we have that, let’s go and switch back to the browser here. And I’m going to refresh, and let’s see when each one of these is triggered. So right now, we have beforeCreate, created, beforeMount, and mounted. So we before we did anything, notice we didn’t do anything on this page, nothing happened, all we did was we hit refresh, then the page loaded, and four items here were triggered.

Now, let’s take a look at that lifecycle visual once again, ’cause it helps to kinda see all of the items that took place during that process. It may not seem like anything happened, but as you can tell, a lot of things were happening in the background.

So when the lifecycle diagram says new Vue, this means that a new component is being instantiated. So it’s going to run the intializer, which means it’s gonna be … intializer, it’s gonna be created, and then it’s gonna set up all of its data, and all of its dependencies, everything like that is being brought in, before create and created are gonna manage those processes. So if you need access to something very early on in the component lifecycle, then these are gonna be the lifecycle hooks that you would use.

Then the created method then is going to take it from there. It’s going to take it, it’s going to see, does it have an element option. If no, then it’s going to perform one process, if yes, then it’s gonna see does it have a template option.

So these items are really related directly to the data that’s being rendered out onto the screen. It’s checking to see what kind of values that it’s gonna be presenting, if it is gonna presenting them to the user.

Moving down, you can see from there it’s gonna check to see does it compile the template into a render function. If yes, it’s gonna come this, or if it has a template option, then it’s going to then say compile the elements outer HTML as a template.

Now, if some of this is confusing, don’t worry. It’s very confusing especially if you’re new to Vue. I more just wanna kinda show you that as you are building your Vue applications out, you’re gonna noticing a lot of things are happening behind the scenes. And sometimes that can be a little bit confusing or intimidating. I wanna show you that there’s actually just a set of processes that Vue is going through. It’s almost like a set of checkboxes, and it’s saying, “Okay, I need to know what this component is trying to do. Is it trying to show the user something? Is it just a small presentation component, or does it have all kinds of data? And do I need to run all these processes?” So that’s really what this lifecycle is about. It’s Vue trying to figure out what it needs to do.

And then from that process, it goes into the beforeMount process, and then it creates the element, and it does all kinds of different Vue-related items, and then comes down into mounted.

Now, one thing I will tell you from experience. I built out multiple production applications in Vue, and I will tell you that I probably spend when it comes to these lifecycle hooks, I probably spend about 90% of my time using just two or three of them. And so I’m really gonna focus on those, and I’ll let you know which ones they are.

The mounted hook is most likely the one I use the very most, because this means that Vue is already figured out what kinda component it’s dealing with, it has initialized all of the different elements that it needs from a template perspective from the div element, it’s set up its own version of the DOM on the page, everything like that, and it’s mounted.

So this is where I do a lot of the set up for my components is in this hook right here. Now, once it is mounted, that means that it is loaded up on the screen. You can see if you come back here that mounted was the very final step in the process when the page loaded. And then from there, once it is loaded, now we get into what happens when something gets updated on the screen. Remember, one of the top reasons why you use frameworks like Vue, or Angular, or React is because you want your application to be dynamic. You want the ability for a user to click buttons, and type into forms, and to have other actions, and other behavior to be automatically triggered inside of that application. And so what goes on at this stage of the process is very critical. And you may have noticed that our beforeUpdate and our update did not get triggered.

Now, I wanna show you something a little bit interesting. This may be a little bit odd to you, but you know that we have a login form right here. And just to review what that looks like, we are calling a login component, so recalling an external component, and then we have this update listener inside of the login component. Well, you would think that would mean that when the data gets updated in login, it’s going to update our dashboard. But let’s see exactly what happens.

So if I type an email in here and click on login, you can see that it did console-log some data out, that is all that’s happening inside of this update login details. We’re omitting an update event, and we’re passing in the email. And that’s all we’re doing. But notice that our beforeUpdate and our updated lifecycle hooks were not triggered. And that is because we didn’t actually update anything inside of our dashboard component. Everything was encapsulated inside of the login.

Now, if I were to take these, so I’m gonna copy these functions here, and I’ll place me inside of the login component. Now, if I do this, and let’s just be clear here that we’ll say beforeUpdate from login, and then updated from login. If I hit save now and come back here and start typing, even as I’m typing, before I even submit the form, it is updating. We have the beforeUpdate and we have the updated, and both are only in the login, we’re still not making any changes directly in the component.

So this is something that can be very confusing, if you’ve never seen it before, because you may think that a parent’s components if it has any child component updates, you would think that it receives all of those. But Vue is very good at isolating those update events. So if you wanna capture something in the update stage, you need to make sure that you are doing that in the component itself.

So let’s stretch that, just so you believe. Let’s go into the dashboard, and I’m going to add one more little form element here. So I’m gonna say input text and we’ll connect this. So I’ll say bind it directly to the dashboard data model. So say v-model and we’ll just say something like maybe subdomain. It could be anything. It could be ASDF or ASTF, it doesn’t matter you can call this whatever you want. And then add in a subdomain data element here, so we have something that it can bind to, hit save. And now you can see we have this new form field. I’m gonna close this, and if I start typing anything, you can see that now that beforeUpdate and the updated lifecycle hooks were triggered. So that is one of the biggest take aways I want you to have from this entire guide, is understanding the way the update cycle works, because that’s something that you’re going to wanna tap into as you’re building out the applications, and understanding that it’s encapsulated inside of the component that’s being updated is very critical.So that is how the how the update process works.

And now we have two more, and I’m going to describe what they do, and then I’m gonna explain what their role should be, and then I’m gonna show you two more that weren’t listed. And these other two are ones that aren’t technically lifecycle hooks, but I think they should be seen in the same light, because they are used with the same type of intention, and hopefully that’ll make sense when I walk through it.

So what beforeDestroy and destroyed do is they are watching for when the component is removed, when it’s taken off of the stake. So let’s say that we have all of our data here, and then a user goes and clicks on home. Now, they’re redirected to the home component, and what happens, you can see right here, is our dashboard component has been destroyed, and it is no longer there. So the main role of what it is going on here with this lifecycle hook is that this gives you the ability to be able to clear off any processes.

So a very common thing that I use this for is say that you have an application and one of the component so has a timer in it. So I built a invoicing application that had a timer on one of the pages where you could record your time as you’re working. And that timer was running anytime that component was alive. Well, when the user left that page, the timer needed to stop or else the timer would keep on running in the background. So the destroyed hook allowed me to do that. I was able to say, “Okay, we are going to destroy that timer. We’re going to stop it from running that way we don’t have any memory leaks.” That’s really what the destroyed hooks are for, is for being able to clear out any processes the you do not want to keep running.

So let’s go back to the dashboard, and we’re gonna go through two more methods. And these are not listed inside of these lifecycle hooks, because technically they are route watchers. And when … I mean route watcher, I mean they’re watching for changes in the route by the user which that is technically not associated with the lifecycle hook, but it is associated with the way a user’s interacting with the component, and that’s the reason why I wanted to include it in this deep dive.

So now what I’m going to do is I am going to come down here under destroyed, and I’m gonna add a new hook. So this is gonna say beforeRouteEnter, and then this takes three arguments, to, from, and next. Now, inside of here … So what this is doing, and then also make sure you’re giving a comma here at the very end.

So what beforeRouteEnter does is it listens for when a user is trying to access this route. So the most common time that you’re gonna use this is to check to see … So say that you have a part of your application that you only want a authorized user to access. That’s a very common use case. Well, this allows you to do that.

So let’s say that we are connected to an authorization API, and I say const loggedIn, and for right now we’re just gonna assume they logged in successfully, the API said, “Yes, this user is authorized so we’re gonna say it’s true.”

Then I can say if loggedIn, and then that assumes that this is true. So saying if loggedIn in JavaScript is the same thing as saying if loggedIn = true. So I’m gonna say if they are logged in, then I want to return, or I wanna run the process next. So what next does is that this is a reserved function inside of beforeRouteEnter, and so you can see it’s this next value. What next represents is where we want the user to go next. If we want them to be able to continue to this page, then we just say next without any arguments. And that’s what we have right here. We’re saying the user’s logged in, so yes, we should allow them to come here.

But if they’re not logged in, then we want another process to take place. So here I can say next, and then as a string, pass in the path I want them to go to, which in this case means I want them to be redirected to the homepage. So this should give us the identical behavior we have right now, because we’re just hard-cording true in, and then it will change it to false and see if it works.

So I’m gonna come right here, and I’m gonna try to come to the dashboard. If I hit return, everything works, because it’s returning true. Now what happens though if this is false? So I’m gonna hit save, and now if I try to access the dashboard, if I hit return here, you can see it automatically redirected me to the homepage. So hopefully you can kinda see why I wanted to include these types of processes in a guide like this, because this isn’t part of the component lifecycle, but it is a part of the lifecycle of the user accessing a component. And so I thought that this would be something important, I thought it was missed out from a lot of the other tutorials I’ve seen.

So I’m going to now make this true again, so we can access the dashboard. And we can verify that by going to dashboard. And we just have one more function that I wanna go through.

So this next one is imagine they have a scenario where you have a user typing in a form, and they accidentally click to leave to a different page, not realizing that their data hasn’t been saved. This is pretty common use-case. Now, you might think that you would put that in the beforeDestroy hook. But that’s not really what beforeDestroy is for. That’s not it’s role. If you remember, the role of these two is really just to provide a way of cleaning up any processes. If you want to try to catch the user before they leave, the best and the recommended function to use is what is called the beforeRouteLeave function, it takes the same to, from, and next arguments.

And then from there what we can do is we can just ask the user a question. So I’ll say const answer = window.location or actually not location, this one’s window.confirm. And then, “Are you sure, your changes won’t be saved.”

And then from there all we’re gonna do window.cofirm gives us the ability to receive a Boolean value. So if they say okay, then it’s the same as storing true in answer, and if they say cancel, it’s the same as storing false. So if I say if the answer, which means if it’s true, then I want to allow them to go to whatever page it was they wanted to go to. Else, so if they hit cancel, then I wanna say next(false), which means that beforeRouteLeave is gonna say okay, it turns out that user didn’t wanna leave, and so do not allow them to leave. That’s why it’s called beforeRouteLeave.

So now … Oh, it looks like I have a typo. Oh, yeah, it’s a good reminder. Each one of these methods, and this is a case for all of Vue. Whenever you have these methods, they are objects. And so because at the end of the day export default is an object, it’s a set of key value pairs, then you have to make sure you list a comma after each one of those. But hitting save, that should fix it, and yes, we’re good to go.

So now we’re on the dashboard. Now if I click on home, you can see it has this little pop-up and it says, “Are you sure, your changes won’t be saved.” If I hit cancel, then nothing happens, we are kept on that page, and the user doesn’t lose their data. If I hit home, and hit okay, it allows me to be redirected. So that’s a way where you’re able to capture a user to make sure that they don’t do something like leave a page and lose data that they might’ve lost. And so that is a very helpful function.

So one last item I wanna leave you with. We’ve covered all of the methods, and we’ve discussed them, but the very first question that I had when I started going through these different elements was why do we need the beforeCreate and the created, the beforeMount and mounted? Why couldn’t we just use your created, mounted, and updated? And one thing I will say is, like I mentioned earlier, I really only use a few of these for every application I build. It’s very rare that I will use beforeMount, beforeCreate, or really even Created. The ones I use the most are gonna be mounted, beforeUpdate, updated, and then destroyed. And the task that I perform in each of those, and just as one side note, I do use these constantly but they’re not in lifecycle hooks, so I don’t count in the list, I use these in pretty much every single application a number of times. The beforeRouteEnter is the most common one I use, just because it allows me to have a guard in front of each component.

But going back to the lifecycle hooks, the mounted gives me pretty much all of the same access to data, and it gives me access to the lifecycle, or the point of the life of the component that beforeCreate/created, or beforeMount gives me.

So that’s the reason why I really use mounted for anything such as calling an outside API, storing the data, and then having it render on the page. That’s typically what I use mounted for. Occasionally I will use that inside of created, but most of the time I’m using that inside of mounted.

beforeUpdate is helpful for checking for data validation issues. So that’s what I use it for. So if you have a form with a number of validations and you do not want the user to be able to submit it and update the component without running through those validations, beforeUpdate is helpful through that.

Updated is helpful for updating the page after a change has occurred. So say the user hits save, they submitted some data, then updated allows me to capture that and then update the page automatically. And then like we talked about, the destroy items, and I typically just use destroyed, that’s usually where I am destroying things such as timers, or web sockets or anything like that.

So I know that was a longer guide, I really wanted to give you a single point of reference that you could look back at in the future, because this is something that I even have to look at quite often when I’m building out Vue apps, is seeing the full list of each one of these lifecycle hooks, and when they’re called. And so I wanted to give you a single guide that you could point to and say, “Okay, yeah, this is a full list of items, this is their syntax, their name, this is how they’re called, and this is how they work with components.”

So great job if you went through that, you should now have a good idea of how the lifecycle hook process works inside of Vue.js.

Resources

In this JavaScript tutorial we’re going to take a comprehensive look into the ternary operator. We’re going to discuss what a ternary operator is, why they’re important to use and then we’re going to walk through a number of examples. So the very first question is, what is a ternary operator? Kind of has a weird name and you’re going to find out later it has an even more weird syntax. A ternary operator is simply a conditional in JavaScript that can be placed on a single line. Ternary operators are important to learn because as you’re going to see in the screen cast, they’re required when building out conditionals directly into applications such as React apps or Vue applications. We’re going to take a very different approach to walking through the ternary operator than I’ve seen from other videos.

We’re first going to look in analyze at what attorney operator would look like in a React application. Then we’re going to go through two examples. We’re going to start off with a basic, just very similar to an if/else conditional. And then we’re going to see how you can implement compound conditionals directly into the ternary operator. As always, I’ll be following along in the comments section. So if you have any questions, comments, recommendations, anything like that, feel free to add those and I’ll get back to them as soon as I can. And if this video was helpful along your own coding journey, please give it a like and subscribe so I can keep on making more of them. So with all that being said, let’s dive into the code.

Why the JavaScript Ternary Operator is Important

Let’s walk through the code for the ternary operator and we’re first going to start off by looking at why the ternary operator in JavaScript is necessary and the reason why I’m going with this approach is because I have seen through the years that the ternary operator can be very confusing as a very different syntax than the regular JavaScript conditional or even the Switch statement. And so I want to first show why ternary operators are important to understand because the very first question that I usually get from a student after I have shown them how to use a ternary operator is, “Why in the world would I want to use this really weird looking syntax when I could use a regular if/else conditional or a case statement?” And it’s a fair question until you see the rationale for why. So I’m going to open up the HTML tab right here. And I’m going to write what looks like HTML but it’s actually a template engine called JSX and so if you write any programs or you ever want to write any programs in React or Vue, then you might use JSX in order to write out your templates. So it looks a lot like HTML. And for the sake of example, you can just imagine that it’s HTML if you’ve never used it before, ’cause it looks like it.

So I’m going to create a div here. And let’s imagine that I’m building out a React project and I want to show or I want to hide a div or in let’s say, it’s a tab. The way that I can do that is by saying, class name, equals and then in curly brackets here, I can write some JavaScript code. Now, if I want to show or hide this specific div or this tab, or whatever it is, then I need to have some conditional logic. So say, we want to check to see if someone has the right permissions, then I can’t do something like this. I can’t write a regular conditional and say if, has permission === true. Then on another line like this have all of my logic. That is not something that is allowed. So I’m going to get rid of all of that. Let’s see what we can do.

This is where the ternary operator comes in. I have to write this all on one line. And what a ternary operator allows you to do is to do that. Is to write an entire conditional on a single line. Here what I could say is, has permission and then I’m going to do a question mark, and then we’ll say active and I’m making all of this up right here. This is just an example to show what you may build. Then we’re going to get into real examples later on. So I could say active colon and then disabled. So what I have done here is I’ve provided a conditional. So this is the same thing as saying if, has permission then I want you to return active and if not, I want you to return disabled. This is the only way or the proper way I should say, for building a conditional in tools like React or Vue so that you can have some dynamic behavior built directly into your HTML and your JSX. So this is the main reason why ternary operators are so important to learn because if you are building out any kinds of real world front end application, you’re most likely going to have to build in something like this at some point or another.

JavaScript Ternary Operator Examples

Now that you’ve seen the example, I’m going to comment this out, and now let’s go into the JavaScript code and let’s actually go through real working examples. I’m going to start with a basic one, and then we’re going to go into a more advanced one. So I’m going to start off my creative a function here. I’m kind of call it age, verification. It’s going to take in an age. And then inside of here, I’m going to place the conditional. If you’re brand new to JavaScript, and you’ve never heard of functions at all, do not worry. This is going to be very basic. I’m simply wrapping all the behavior up in a function, so it’s easier to call it and print it out down here. This isn’t going to dive into functions and details just a wrapper for what we’re going to be doing.

Here I could say, if the age is greater than 25, then I want to console log, can rent a car and then right here we want to provide an else statement and then say I want that to be console log is not old enough yet. And that’s all that we want this function to do. So it’s pretty basic then I’m going to call this function by saying age, verification, if I say 15 here, if I save and then run it, it’s going to print out that the user is not old enough. If I change this to 55, and then run it again, now it’s going to say they can rent the car. So this is all working properly. It’s an incredibly basic function and this conditional is pretty much as basic as you can get. I did that on purpose. Anytime that I’m wanting to learn something new, especially something that might be a little bit more on the confusing side, I like to start off with a base case. We’re going to simply comment this out and then below here, I’m going to show you the syntax that will allow you to have a ternary operator.

We’re going to use the exact same logic, we’re just going to switch it up and use it with the ternary syntax. Now the way that you can do this is I’m going to store it in a variable. I’m going to say, let, answer, equals. Then here, I’m going to say age greater than 25, and then a question mark. Then I’m going to have it say the same thing. So I’ll say I can rent a car and then colon can’t rent a car. You could put is not old enough, whatever you want on that side. So that’s going to store it in a variable and then let’s simply print out the value of whatever that variable is. So we’ll say console log, answer and don’t worry, I know I typed all of that out pretty quickly we’re going to walk through exactly what the mapping is doing and everything.

Let me hit clear, save and then run it. And now you’re going to see it says, “They can rent the car.” So we’re getting the exact same answers before if I change this to five years old and hit run, it’s going to say they can’t rent the car. So this is working perfectly. This is the exact same behavior we were getting when we had that conditional on the five lines of code. So let’s walk through what’s going on. Right here, you can see the very first part of a ternary operator, is going to be the conditional. This is exactly the same as saying, if age is greater than 25 and so this is the first part you’re going to want to break your ternary operators, it’s easiest way to think of them is that they’re broken into three parts. The first part is the conditional. After the question mark, the second part is going to be, if that conditional is true, I want you to run this code.

Now if it’s not, you have the colon, and now this is going to be what happens if the condition was not met. If this is false, if the age is not greater than 25, then it’s going to skip everything here and then it’s going to parse the colon and say, “Okay, we want to return whatever is in this value here.” Now I also could have written out the console log statement here if you’re curious on why store this in a variable it’s really just for the sake of space because the ternary operators can get a little bit long. So I could have done something like this.

I could have just said age is greater than 25, then I could have said console log, can’t rent a car. Then here, console log again and then can’t rent a car, just like this. Now if I save this, clear it and run it, then you’ll see that we get the exact same behavior where it says, can’t rent a car. But typically, because of the way that this works, whenever you have … And let me get rid of all of that, just so it’s out of the way. So whenever you have a situation where you’re using a ternary operator, typically you do not want to put your console log statements actually in the true or the false values here. So let’s walk through the mapping just to make this clear, because I cannot tell you how … Don’t worry if this looks weird. I can’t tell you how many times a student has come up to me and says, I do not like using ternary operators, they don’t make any sense they look weird. I can tell you it just takes practice and what helped me the most when I was learning them is understanding what the mapping was.

Remember, the very first part of it is the first part of the conditional. We have, if age is greater than 25, we have age is greater than 25. They don’t have the if here, but you can just imagine that the F is right in front of it. then the question mark means that we’re now going to break into whatever happens when this is true and when it’s false. This right here is the true part. This is like dropping here into line three where it says, “Can’t rent a car. Then after this, this little colon here, you can imagine that this is the else. So this is exactly what we have here on line four where it says else and then it says, can’t rent a car. It’s exactly what we have here where it says is not old enough.

This is the basic way of implementing a turnaround operator. Like, you can see if you ever wanted to implement this in a React application or a Vue app, you couldn’t write the code like this. If you wanted to put it on one line directly into the HTML, then you’re going to have to write it like we have right here. So that’s why it’s important to know. I’m going to get rid of all of this and now let’s get into a little bit more of an advanced example. Before we get into this, I want to add the caveat that what I’m about to show you is important to understand that I would not recommend using it on a regular basis because the single ternary after you practiced it enough it will actually start to become very familiar to you and it’s not going to look as weird as it may look the very first time or second time that you’ve seen it.

What I’m going to show you now is, how you can implement compound logic. So multiple conditions all into the same ternary operator, and I can tell you this is going to look very weird. I’ve been doing this for a number of years. And when I see a compound conditional built into a ternary, it still takes me a while to kind of dissect the code to see exactly what’s happening. So I wouldn’t recommend doing this. But it is important to understand because I have run into a number of projects that I took over and I worked on, where the developer did do this. And it was important for me to understand what their logic and what their process was, because if I didn’t, then I’d be lost in the code base. So let’s walk through a more advanced example. I’m going to create another function here, I’m going to call it admin controls. So we’re going to say that the purpose of this function is to either show or hide admin controls.

Once again, this is something that is similar to a feature you may build into a React or a Vue or angular application. So say admin controls, it’s going to expect to get a user. Then inside of here, let’s follow the same exact process we had before. Let’s get it working with a regular if/else conditional, and then we’re going to turn that into a full ternary operator. So here, I first want to check to see if the user is logged in. So I’m going to say, if user … And now in JavaScript with a conditional, if you’re looking for a true or false value, then you don’t have to say, if user is true, you can just say, if user and it will assume you mean if the user is true, if it exists. So I’m going to say, if user and then I’m going to drop down inside and I’m going to put another conditional. I’m going to say if, so we know that we have a user. We can be confident that we can ask the user if they’re an admin.

Here I’ll say if user.admin and same thing we’re expecting a true or false value. And if the user is an admin or not. Then inside of here, I’m just going to console log and say, showing admin controls. Just like that. Then if they’re not an admin, we need to have some logic for that. So I’m going to say, if not, then I want to console log and say you need to be an admin. Then we also need to verify, we need to have a backup for if the user is just a guest user. Maybe the user hasn’t signed in. Here I’m going to put another conditional and say else and then we’ll put console log and then you need to be logged in, just like that.

Now let’s create some example, some kind of case studies here. I’m going to say, let … We’re going to create three user types. Let user one, this is the full admin. Say they have a name. This one will be Christine. It’s admin with a value of true. This is just a basic JavaScript object. Here I will call admin controls and I’m going to parse in user one. Now let’s save this and let’s just verify that this one’s working. If we run this, we should get the, it’s showing user controls. Yes, everything here is showing admin controls. That’s all working properly. Let’s just give ourselves a little bit of space and we’re going to create a few more users. This one’s going to be user two and then for this one we’ll give it a different name and then admin here is going to be false. Then we’re going to call it slightly differently, just like this.

Now if I save and I run this, we should have the, you need to be an admin. So we still have our showing admin controls and now it says, “You need to be an admin.” Everything there is working perfectly, they dropped into this because it was true. But then they were not an admin, so it fell into the else statement. Everything there is working. And last one, let’s say user three, and this is our guest user. So this is going to be a user who doesn’t have any values whatsoever. Just guess a user three and we’re just going to say that there, no. Now this user three they should return that you need to be logged in. Let me clear this, hit run and it should say, “You need to be logged in.” Which is perfect.

Everything here is working and our conditional is working. But let’s imagine that you need to put this in a ternary operator. Now this is going to look very weird. Once again, I would not recommend doing this at all, just because I think it leads to unreadable code. But if you ever come across a ternary operator that looks like this, you’re going to know exactly what it’s doing. I’m going to create a variable that we’re going to store this. So I’m going to say let, response equal and then here we are looking … Let me comment all this out, just so you don’t get a false reads on it. We have this user argument. I’m going to say user, then from there, we’re going to start off the same way we did with our basic examples.

It’s going to say, user, question marks where we’re going to first check, is the user true. Then this is where it gets weird. This is where we’re going to place another ternary operator inside of the very first statement. Because the way that this logic works is it’s going to check to see, is this the case? Is this user, do they exist? Same thing as saying user true and then we’re going to drop in to what happens if it’s true? Well what happens when it’s true in this example? Well we drop in to this second conditional. That’s exactly what we do here with the ternary operator. We’re going to say, user.admin and then we’re going to give another question mark. Because this is like asking that second question. We’re going to say, user admin and then here showing admin controls … and then we’re going to give what happens if they’re not an admin. You need to be an admin.

Now that we have that, now we need to go in to that final else. This is what happens if the user didn’t exist. Now we’ll say, you need to be logged in. Okay? We stored all of that in the response. Let’s just console log that, we say console log response. Hit Save, clear this and we should get all of the exact same answers. If I hit Run, there you go. You need to be logged in right above it was you need to be an admin and then showing admin controls. As you can see, this looks really weird. One thing I will say is unlike the if/else conditional, the spaces and having these carriage returns where you have all of the code on different lines, that may not be allowed in the JSX, or in your React or Vue application. But you actually can have carriage returns and it is valid code.

You could make this look something like this. This is going to look possibly even more weird but the last time I ran into one of these in the wild in a project, they actually had it all on multiple lines. I wanted to show that to you. I could say something like, user and then question mark, user admin, have the entire conditional right here. Then put this on another line, just like that. For some reason, with the way that JavaScript is compiled, this still will work. If I hit Clear, save, and then run this again, everything here still work. You may see some examples, it looks something like this. If you ever see this syntax know that the developer created a ternary operator, in this case, a compounded one.

Let’s walk through what’s going on here, kind of line by line. Let’s start at the top. We’re checking to see if the user exists. That’s a same thing as just placing the user right there. Same thing as saying, user === true. If that is true, they will drop down into this next line here. If you prefer, if this is messing you up too much, then let me put this all on a single line again, just so we can read it all from left to right. Right here, what we’re doing is we’re saying is the user, do they exist? Yes. Okay. Well now it’s time to drop into a nother conditional.

One thing that does help me whenever I’m working with this kind of code, is I like to wrap the separate ones up in parens, just like this. This makes it a little bit easier and as you’ll see, this also works exactly the same way. Now if I hit Run, everything still works but I think at least in my opinion, this is a little bit easier to read and it shows that this is a nested conditional. Technically, you could keep on nesting them. You could have another conditional here, or you could have it in the else block. But to me, even having two of them is honestly a little bit too much. But it’s your world, you get to live in it. So build your conditionals however you want. But I just hope I wouldn’t have to take over your code base if that is what you decide on doing.

What we’re just getting back to, we have the user first conditional. They drop in to this conditional. This is the same thing as what we have here on lines three through seven. Where it says, “If this is the case, I want you to show the admin controls. If not, I want you to … You need to be an admin.” Same process. Then finally, if the user didn’t exist. If this was false, then it skips everything here until it finds the final colon and then it says you need to be logged in. What we wrote here on line 12 is exactly the same as what we wrote on line two to 10. As you could see the behavior is identical but the difference is, if you ever need to write your conditional all on one line, then this is the syntax that will allow you to do that.

Now if this was confusing to you at all and do not feel bad if it was, ternary operators are one of the more confusing parts of learning JavaScript, especially in the beginning. Then what my recommendation would be, to go through the show notes. I’ll provide all of this code for you. Put it into your own code pen, use it on your local system and then play with it. Make some changes, look and see what happens if you change something in this part of the conditional and see how it maps to what you have here in the normal if/else statement. Go through it until it starts to really sink in and make sense. Then once you get into learning about React and these other frameworks, and you see even these ternary operators you’re going to know exactly what to do.

Let’s talk about CSS media queries in this web development tutorial. And if you’ve never heard of what a media query is, that’s perfectly fine. We’re going to start from the ground up. A media query is a tool in CSS that allows for us to implement responsive design elements. When I say responsive, what I mean is what I’m going to show you right here. I have two nearly identical sites. One is responses and uses media queries, and the other one is not. We’re going to walk through, after this demo, we’re going to walk through the code and we’re going to implement a full media query for this homepage. Let’s first look at a media query based site. If I open this up, what I can do is it looks good on desktop and then if I were to access this on a mobile device, which I can mimic by just bringing this down here, you can see that the entire site readjusts. This is what someone coming on an Android or an iPhone would see. You notice how we have the logo has readjusted. It’s now at the top. And then we have the navigation elements are stacked on top of each other. And then the same thing with the contact information.

Then everything else has also readjusted. This is looking really good. This is the kind of experience you’d want to see on a mobile device. Now, if you open up a site that does not have the media query though, and then try to perform the same action, you’re going to get very different behavior. Notice now, if I take this down to the same size, that it does not readjust. Someone accessing the site’s going to load it up and they’re going to see this distorted looking page. They’re going to have to scroll to the right. A bunch of things are kind of shrunk in and overlapping. This is really not a good experience. This is the reason why media queries are so powerful. Now that we have a good idea on what they are, let’s walk through how we can implement them.

I have this page open and I have the code open for it right here. I’m going to start by creating a new style sheet here called media queries. This isn’t necessary, this is just because I want to be able to have all my media queries in one spot. It will also be easy for us to see them. Let me open that up and in the styles directory, I’m going to save a file called media queties.css. Then here, we’re going to be able to add all of those. Now, the syntax for using a media query is … it looks a little bit different if you’ve never used it before. It starts with a @ symbol. Then you say media. Then this is a method or a function. That means it takes an argument. The very first thing that we have to provide is the breakpoint. If I say medium max-width. Then I’m going to use 615 pixels. What this is going to do is this is going to say that whenever we have a screen that is below 615 pixels wide, which is a pretty standard size for using with smartphone devices, then I want you to apply these styles.

Now, whenever you’re using media queries, a trick to make sure that you are following is your media queries should be at the very end. They should be the last styles that you include. The reason for that is because if you have media queries and then you call other styles after that, they will override it. You need to make sure you call that at the very end. What this is going to do is the browser’s going to look, it’s going see all of these media queries, and it’s going to check and say, “Okay, these are the styles I am going to apply, and I’m going to run these if the screen is 615 pixels or less.” You could do this for any of them. Let’s just test this out.

If you look at the index here in the navigation wrapper, you can see that we have navigation wrapper and then we have all of these items inside of it. We have a left column, a center column div, and then a right column. I think this is going to be a great place to start. If I say navigation-wrapper. Then inside of here, I’m going to change the flex direction. Instead of having the default row, I’m going to change it to column. Then I also want to update the height so it’s 100%. Let’s see what this does for us on our site that previously was not working on mobile. Let me open this up in a new browser window. Now, if I shrink this down, you can see that when we hit that breakpoint, you see how this got readjusted. Before, that was not working. Before, it just simply went to the side and then it didn’t shrink down and it didn’t stack it on top of each other like that.

That means that our media query is firing and it’s working. Now, we still have some work to do, because this doesn’t look very nice. We still have to adjust some of the other items. I don’t want the phone number here at the top. I want to have the logo at the top. We’re going to be able to leverage Flexbox in order to make that possible. I’m just going to take this down to about right here, about this size. Now, when we switch back, we’re just going to be able to look at that. I’m also going to keep the code open at the same time, so that we can save some time and just look at it simultaneously. Okay, now that we have our navigation wrapper updated, I want to talk about a very powerful tool inside of Flexbox that you may or may not be aware of.

Flexbox gives you the ability, not simply to line out and align your items in a really nice and easy manner, it also gives you the ability to change the order. That is how we are going to readjust the order that these elements are shown. This is one of my favorite parts about Flexbox. Right here, if you remember we have our left column, our center column, and then our right column. What I can do is say navigation wrapper. Then I want to grab the left column, just like this. Then inside of here, I want to change the order to two. That’s going to allow us to change the default order, because usually the order is simply the order that it is declared in the HTML. But what we can do is we can actually override that using Flexbox. I’m also going to add some margin top and some margin bottom. Let me do 10 pixels on the top and then margin bottom, I’m going to go with, let’s say 15 pixels.

That’s all we need the left column. Now, for the center column, remember the center column is the logo. The … if you want to take a look at it … This is the final site, but this also is what we started with. Here you can see that the left column is the phone number and the hours. The center column is the nav component and logo. Then the third column is this address here. That’s what we’re looking to adjust. I want to take the center column and I’m going to change the order here so that the order’s going to be one. Then I also want to change the width. The width here is going to be 100%. Then lastly, we want to grab the right column and, as you may have guessed, since we used two on the left column, for the right column, we want to use three here. Then I’m going to also just add some margin on the top. Here I’m going to say 15 pixels.

Now, this isn’t going to be perfect yet, because we still have those links that we need to fix, but this might get us a little bit closer. Let’s see. Hit refresh. You can see that is looking much better. Do you see how we have this logo now that is at the very top? Our images, or I’m sorry, our links here, that these need to get fixed. That’s what’s pushing everything over. But we can see that everything now is in the correct order. That is looking really nice. As you can see, all we have to do is because we leverage Flexbox, we’re able to alter that order and control exactly how we wanted the page to be rearranged. Then let’s switch over to the index HTML page. Let’s see, we have a class of links wrapper. Then a nav link inside of each of those.

That’s going to be the next class that we’re going to add to our media query here. Now, what we can do is we’ll say links wrapper. Then here inside of it, if you want … if you’re using Flexbox and you want to change the order so it’s no longer is showing from left to right, but instead it goes from top to bottom, you can simply change the flex direction. We’re going to change that to column. Then I’m also going to add some margin to the bottom. For that, we’ll go with 20 pixels. Then let’s also update the nav link, but before we do that, let’s just see where we’re at. If I hit refresh that is looking much better. See, that this is exactly what we’re looking to do. That is how we’re able to leverage media queries to be able to adjust dynamically how the page is laid out.

I’m really liking that. Now, let’s go to our links wrapper. We’re going to select all of the nav links, the nav link class. Inside of here, I’m going to just add … They’re stuck a little bit close together. That would be hard for someone on mobile to click the right button. Let’s add some margin to the top and bottom. Then from there, we’re going to update the font size. Let’s go with 1.5em. Then lastly, we’re going to adjust the width to be 100%. Now, if you hit save, come back, hit refresh, there you go. Now, what we’ve done is we’ve completely changed the layout of this nav bar so that it matches exactly what we’re wanting on a mobile device. Imagine you are building out this website and you’re building it for a restaurant, just like we have here, and someone clicks on the link from Yelp. They are going to want to see something that looks like what we have here, not have distorted site where they don’t even know where to click or anything like that. They want to have something that really fits with that mobile user experience.

We’re able to leverage media queries in order to do that. Let’s just review, really quick, what we’ve done. The syntax, once again, for a media query is using the @ symbol, the work media. Then defining the width. You can have multiple media queries. You could have a media query that is for smartphones. Then you can adjust and have a media query that is for iPads or tablets. You could have as many media queries as you want. Then the page would dynamically change. This is almost kind of like a conditional. You can think of this as being a way that you can tell the browser that these are different rules that you want it to follow whenever the user is on a different screen size. Then from there, you simply have to call that in the HTML, just like we did right up here and it’s going to work and it’s going to readjust.

Then lastly, using tools like CSS Grid and Flexbox give you the ability to control how you want the layout to change. If you weren’t using a tool like that, it’d be much harder to change the order, like we have right here. But because you have those kinds of tools in place, you can simply readjust the entire page based on the screen size.

In this tutorial, we’re going to walk through how links work in HTML. Right here, you can see in the finished product, we have these navigation elements and if I click on them, they will take us to these other pages. Let’s walk through exactly what needs to happen in order for that to work and we’re also going to add all of the pages that this entire project is going to use. We’re going to start building this out.

Now, I know that you may be getting a little bit frustrated because we’ve been doing quite a bit of work and we still seem like were a very far distance away from here, but if you’re learning HTML and CSS for the first time, it is critical to have some of the fundamentals down. We are building out the project, but we’re learning the fundamentals as we go. Let’s get started on this. Let’s create the other files that we need and let’s talk about links.

I’m going to switch back to the code editor here and I’m going to get rid of all of these kind of sample code items. I’m going to get rid of styles, too, and everything else here and I’m going to start by just saying homepage. I want to do another h1 and I’ll say homepage. I’m also going to indent that. Just a little side note, the indentation that you use is very important. The browser doesn’t care about indentation at all, so it’s perfectly fine. You could technically have tabs all over the place and place this right here and this is still going to work. If you hit refresh, you can see it still says homepage, but from a best practice perspective, you really want to make sure that your code is aligned properly. As you go through the project you’ll see how it should be, but for right now, just know that if you have a nested item, like this h1 tag is nested inside of this body tag, then it’s probably a good idea to indent it, so it’s very clearly nested inside.

Now, with all that in place, let’s also update the title. This is going to say Homepage and later on we’re going to probably change it, but for right now, let’s keep it at Homepage. Now, let’s create those other files. Let’s copy everything that we have here and now we’re going to create a about page, a contact page, and a menu page. The way you can do that is by just coming over here in Visual Studio Code on the left-hand side, so go to the menu bar, click on new document and say about.html and then you can paste that in the title. Let’s say about and then in the content itself, just so we can watch it all changing, we’re going to say about. Now, let’s copy this and now go and create another document. This one will say menu.html. Paste that in and as you may have guessed, change the title to say menu and then change that heading to say menu.

We just have one more left, so create one more document. We’ll call it contact. Now, you can call these files whatever you want, but I think it makes sense for them to have a very similar name just so you know exactly what is inside of each one of them because, say for example, and I have seen some students do this where they’ll create one file and call it index html. That’s a convention, your homepage should also be called index.html because that’s what browsers look for, but what the issue is I’ve seen before is something like having the index page there and then the other pages would be something like two dot html, three, four, five and six dot html. That’s not very clear because if you have, say a hundred pages, you want to very clearly and quickly be able to look on the left-hand side, know what is in that file, and then it will make it easier for you later on when you want to go and make updates. Last one is going to be contact and hit save.

Now, if we come back here, now right now we just have our homepage, but if you come up here to the menu bar and you type say, menu, you can see it pulls up our menu document. Then, here if I say contact, it’s going to pull up the contact document. This is exactly the same process as if you hit control O and then you just went and you clicked on one of these. If I click on index once again, then we’re back on the homepage. All of our files that we want to use are all there. Now, how can we link to them?

In the index, the way that you can do this, and this is going to be the start of our nav bar, is we are going to use what is called an A-tag, so you can just start typing A, then hit tab complete and it’s going to look for an href. Now, this href, as you may have noticed, is also the same href we used up here for styles. What the HTML document is saying is that we need to provide a path to the file that we’re wanting to call because that’s really all a link is for a basic HTML site is a link to another document. Here, we can say about.html and inside of the tag itself we can say about. Now, let’s just copy this. Now, we’re going to say menu and then menu. Then, we’ll say contact and then contact and at the very top, let’s also add one for our homepage. This is going to be index.html and this will just say home.

Now, I do want to go back just very briefly and say I’ve kind of glossed over the reason why we use index.html and we use this naming convention. It’s because many servers, when they call for a file or they go into a directory, so kind of like, say that you have a server that goes and it hits this HTML CSS directory, the very first thing it’s going to show is a file called index.html. If you don’t set up any rules on the server or anything like that, it is going to assume that there is a index file and it’s going to try to show that. Once you get into bigger frameworks, like using tools like React or Rails, a lot of that is done for you and you don’t have to do this part yourself, but that is the standard convention. You’re going to see the name, index.html, quite a bit as you build out websites and that’s the reason. It’s because that’s what the server looks for.

Okay, so now that you have that piece of information, let’s switch back to the browser on our homepage and hit refresh. Now, you can see we have our menu here. If I click on about, then you can see it takes us to the about page. I’m going to go back and if I click on menu, it takes me to the menu page. Contact takes me to the contact page. That’s all that links are is we are just telling HTML where to go find another document. In this case, it’s just the documents that we have here locally. Now if you want to add this nav bar to all of the other pages, then you have to copy this code and put it on each one of those pages. Let’s do that now just to make it a little bit easier to navigate. I’m going to add it to about menu, make sure you’re saving it after each time, and then contact. Hit save and then come back and hit refresh. Now, if you click on any of these links, you’ll see that our navigation menu’s still there and it’s because we copied all the links over. That gives us the ability to do that.

Now, I told you that this is a path to the document. It’s important that it isn’t just the document name. Let’s add in a little demo here. If I click on new folder and say I have a folder here called pages. Inside of pages, I have another document and we’ll just call this something like, let’s say just demo.html, just like this. In the index page, if I come down here and I create a new link and say demo.html, hit save. Let’s come and let’s copy all of this content here just so we know once we’ve successfully reached the demo page. That’s demo and then demo. Okay, so I’m going to hit save. Notice I’m also keeping these nav elements here. It’s for a reason I’m going to show you here in a second.

Now, if we come back to the homepage, you can see we have this little demo link. Now, if I click this, it’s going to throw an error and the reason is because, and you can find this up in the URL bar, notice where it tried to find the document. It was still in the HTML CSS directory and then it just tried to find demo.html, so it’s not just the file name. It’s actually the full path that you have to provide. The way you could fix that is right here just say pages/demo.html. Now, if you hit refresh and go and click on this link, you can see that that works. That’s part of it.

Now, there are a couple other things that it’s important to understand when it comes to links. Do you notice how the styles are no longer being applied? The reason for that is because when we’re importing the style sheet here in the demo, what is happening is it’s all relative. The demo file is looking for a styles.css file inside of the pages directory. That is very important to understand because if you don’t understand that part, then you are going to run into a lot of bugs when it comes to understanding how the path works and how you can access and import files. We saw how you can go and grab that demo link. Let me close off some of these other files and also, one very helpful little trick if you’ve never done this before, let me close off everything, so I’m going to have demo open and then, let’s also take a look at the index page right next to each other. You can right click on a file and then, right here you can say open to the side. Now, you can see both of these right next to each other. I’ll close this.

Now, the issue that we’re having is that our styles is looking for it in the wrong place. What we can do here, let’s see all of the code, is to go backwards we’re going to use a little bit different syntax. Inside of our pages directory, when we want to move backwards we need to use two dots. In front of styles, put two dots and then a slash. That is going to traverse us back up one directory. Now, if I hit refresh and there you can see the styles are now being pulled in properly. That’s how you can traverse that.

Now, we’re also, we’d have to do the same thing right here. Let’s just go and let’s take this demo just so we have all the same exact links and notice here, when you’re in that demo directory, in the pages directory, you do not want to say pages again or else then it’s going to try to jump up into another page’s directory. We want to delete that, but now, if you hit refresh, all of these are going to be broken. If you click home, that’s broken, about is broken, and hopefully by now it’s starting to make sense why those are broken. It’s because we need to move one level up. The way we can do that is just to add that dot dot in front of each one of these file calls. I’m going to say dot dot, slash, hit save, and notice I did not do with the demo because that one is actually in the right directory.

Now, if I hit refresh, click on about, that works. Click on menu, click on home, go back to demo, demo still works when you click it, and then you can navigate to all of the other pages. That is how you can work with the path whenever you’re wanting to link to other pages in the program.

Now, the very last element that I’m going to talk about, let’s close off demo, is when you want to link to an outside service. Say that you want to link to Instagram. You can say A and then here, if you want to link to a outside website, you need to provide the full path. Here, I can say https://Instagram.com/JordanHudgensand we’ll just say this is the Instagram Profile. Hit save, now come hit refresh, and now you can see Instagram Profile is here. If I click on this, then it’s actually going to open up Instagram just like that. You’re able to not only link to your own internal documents, but you can also link to other websites or anyplace on the website that you want to navigate the user to.

Now, do you notice also how when I clicked on that, it actually took us away from the page? That may not always be what you want to do, so I think it’s a good time to talk about some of the optional attributes that you have with links. Right here, this is the most basic kind of link you’re ever going to use. You have a A tag with an href, which is where you want the user to go if they click. Then, you have the content. Now, you also have the ability inside of that tag to say target and then underscore. The link is going to open up that target or it’s going to open up that link in a new tab. Now, if you switch back, hit refresh, if you click on Instagram profile now, you’ll see that it opens up in a new tab and it didn’t get rid of the actual page that we were on. Depending on the type of user experience that you’re wanting to give your site visitors, you have both options available to you.

In review, we starting building out our navigation bar, we saw how links work, we saw how we can work with different path values, how we can traverse up and backwards, and then we also were able to see how you can link out and have some optional behavior, like targets, when you’re wanting to connect to third party websites.

Let’s dive into how we can use images in HTML. And specifically, we are gonna take a logo and we’re gonna place it here at the top of this nav bar. We’re gonna see how we can import the image and how we can select it using CSS and then also how we can style it and customize its size. If you want to, you can use your own logo or you can use one of the demo ones that I have here, and I’ll include a link to the show notes for you.

The very first thing you can do is open this up and you can see we have a dark version and then a white version. And for this specific background, we really need to use the white version. So right-click on this and then click Save Image As and you can keep the name exactly the same and then place it inside of your project. Now, you can just hit Save right now, but then we’ll also customize exactly where it’s at so that we can see the path and so we can organize it properly.

So if we switch back here and then go to the code, I’m gonna place this above all the other nav links here and let’s just call it Banner Image. So this is going to be a wrapper div. And then I want to use an image tag. So if you’re using Visual Studio Code, you can type, “IMG,” hit tab, and this is gonna give you the values that you want. Now because we place this at the root of our project, you can see that we have this Dev Camp Fantastic Fries logo dash white right here. And so we could just grab this value. And so let me actually copy that name so that I’m not typing it out verbatim.

And then you can place that inside of this SRC tag. Now this SRC tag, it stands for Source, which means that we’re telling the image tag that the source of this image is this path. And then we’ll play around with how we can place this image inside a different part of the project. Now we also have this ALT tag. So here I’m going to say the logo. Now technically you could say anything that you wanted right here. The rational for the ALT tag is there’s a couple reasons. One is if someone has disabled images in their browser, then the ALT tag will show up instead of the image, but the most common reason for using the ALT tag is for accessibility reasons.

So if someone, say someone whose blind is going through your site and the way it works is there’s systems out there that will read things like the ALT tags in your content. If you leave the ALT tag blank, then they’re not gonna know that a logo was there. So that’s part of the reason. Google also reads through this for search engine optimization reasons. So it’s always good to put some kind of value here that describes what the logo is or that a logo is there. So that is gonna give us our basic import so let’s go back and hit refresh. And wow, you can see, that is imported, but that’s definitely not what we’re looking for. And that’s fine, that’s what were expected.

This is gonna take a. by default, the way that HTML works is it brings in the image and it does not do anything to it. It doesn’t try to make it fit or anything like that. That is our job. So now let’s see how we can select this image. So we know that we have a class here called “Banner Image.” And there are a couple different ways that we could customize it. So I could come here and … let me give us a little bit more room. So I could come in the tag itself and just say that I want to provide a hard coded with in line.

So here I could say “With” and for this kind of size, the value that I saw looked the best was something like 216 pixels. And then let’s give it a hight and the height here, you can combine pixels and percentages. So for the height here I could say just 100%. What this means is that we are controlling the width, we’re saying how wide it should be, and then we’re telling the height to just be automatic. So I’ll hit save and now if I hit refresh, you can see that works and that looks really good. And that’s perfectly fine. I usually don’t do it this exact way.

The approach I usually take is to apply a actual CSS class to it. So if I have my banner image here, what I can do is come down to the bottom of the CSS file and say “Banner dash image” and then I want to select the image tag inside of that. And now I can apply the exact same rules. So here I can say with and we wanna go with that 216 pixels and then for the height 100%, hit save, go back and hit refresh, and you can see that is working properly. So that’s just my own personal preference. Part of the reason is because I don’t really like my images to get really messy and the more code that you put inside of this tag, the longer it’s gonna be for you to find it when you need to fix it and also just starts to look a little bit cluttered.

So I’d much rather put it inside of a style tag. But that is how you can import and then customize an image using HTML. And there’s only one more thing that I wanna do before we end this guide and that is I want to place this inside of a little bit more logical place. Because right now, you can see that I have the image at the root of the project, but this doesn’t make a lot of sense because if I start bringing in dozens or hundreds of images, this is gonna start to get really messy. So instead what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna create a new tag, or a new folder here.

I’m just gonna call it “images” and then inside of images, I want to pass in another folder. So I can right click on it and click new folder. And here I’m gonna say “logos.” And then what I can do is I can just click and then drag this in and it says, “Are you sure you wanna move this?” And so yes, I say I want to move it. Now this will break the site. So if I hit refresh here you can see … oh, one thing that is cool. You see that little ALT tag is showing up. So if the image is not available, it will show the ALT tag, but now we have a broken image and it’s because we need to update the path.

So here I will say that I want it to find it in the images directory in logos and then it will go and it will find the image file. Switching back to the browser, hitting refresh. You can see that image is back and it is working properly.

In this guide we’re going to answer the question of what are HTML and the CSS. I’m going to give you a very high level view of them first, and then we’re going to talk about each on independently and how they work together, including a small demo at the end so that you can see how vital both of them are.

What are HTML and CSS? Well, technically they’re just tools that you can use, and they’re syntaxes you can use that allow you to write code that can be interpreted by browsers. By default, a browser can only interpret and then render on the screen so many different types of code. For example, if you were to take an Excel spreadsheet or a Word doc and you try to open it up in Google Chrome or in Firefox, it is not going to work. That’s because the browser is not capable of taking a file like that and interpreting it into something that it can show on the screen. HTML and CSS are capable of that. That is their goal is they provide a syntax so that when the browser see it, when it sees a document that has HTML and CSS code in it, it can interpret it and then it can show exactly what you’re wanting on the screen. Literally every web page in the entire world has HTML, and pretty much all of them also have CSS. We’re going to talk about the different types of roles that each one of them support.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language. Now, when you hear the word language, you may think programming language, but that’s not quite accurate because it really is just providing you a syntax for writing code so that the browser’s able to read it properly. It’s really more of just a markup language, whereas a programming language such as JavaScript or Java or Ruby allows you to have some extra behavior like conditionals and loops and those kinds of concepts. With HTML, you’re simply writing a static page, meaning there’s not really a lot of behavior in it. You need to use other languages in order to make that happen.

What HTML allows you to do is to wrap a structure around content. If you imagine having some type of blog page, HTML allows for you to designate where the content is, where the title is, where a video or an ad might be. Then you’re able to then organize it and later on style it. That’s where CSS comes in.

CSS stands for cascading style sheets. The style word in there may indicate it’s main primary objective. What CSS is in charge of doing is giving style to websites. You’re able to take all of that HTML code that you organize and you put on the page. CSS then goes in, and it adds all of the style elements. This can be anything from colors to fonts to animations. Anything that you look at on the page that has a type of style associated with it mostly likely is coming from CSS.

Let’s walk through a real world analogy that will hopefully help you understand the differences and the specific roles that HTML have compared with CSS. Imagine that you’re building a house. If you’re building a house, the HTML is kind of like the foundation and the wood framing and the roof and the sheet rock. The CSS on the other hand is more like the paint and the carpet and any kind of design accent that isn’t really associated with the structure, but it is what allows a house to look good.

Now let’s take a look at a website and see what happens when you have a website that has HTML and CSS compared with a website that only has HTML. Right here you can see a fully built out website. This has everything from a navigation bar, it has a parallax feature with background images, it has animations, it has a map, and all of the different elements you’d expect in a website. This website has HTML and CSS. Now, I duplicated this website, and if you want to take a look at it, what I did is I removed the CSS. I didn’t make a single change to the HTML. All I did was I removed the calls that brought in the CSS styles, and this is what you would get.

Now, if you scroll through it, it still has all the same content, and it even kept a few elements like the embedded map and some things like that. Because of the CSS’s role, because CSS is in charge of adding styles, what we’re left with here is just plain HTML. It has all of the same structure, but because it doesn’t have the CSS, it doesn’t have any kind of alignment. It doesn’t have the colors. It doesn’t bring in the background images, and it doesn’t align the items in the proper way.

In review, that is a high level overview of what HTML and CSS are. HTML is a markup language that web browsers are able to look at, and they’re able to interpret. They’re able to take in content and then show that on the screen. It provides the structure; whereas, CSS is also a language that you’re able to use, and you’re able to write in the CSS syntax and then have that applied to the HTML code that you write.

This guide walks through the key reasons why it’s important to learn the JavaScript programming language. Including:

1. It’s the only language to work in the browser.
2. It’s used for powerful web applications (Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook)
3. It can be used to build mobile applications
4. It can create scripts to automate your day to day workflow

I think these reasons are important no matter whether you want to become a professional developer, or you are simply wanting to learn a little bit more about the languages itself. The very first reason to learn JavaScript is because JavaScript is the only programming language that can actually be understood by a web browser.

Starting at the time of this filming over 22 years ago some developers decided that they needed a programming language that a browser could understand. If you look at any of the other programming languages out there, and there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, such as Java, Ruby, Python, C, any kind of language like those, those all need to be on a server.

They need to be on the server, and if you’re building a website, that server has to build up all these processes and wrap that code up in a way that the browser can actually interpret.

JavaScript is a little bit different. It was created to be the one language that a browser would actually be able to understand. What this means is you can write JavaScript code, simply open it up in the browser, and that browser can parse through the code interpret it and then run the program.

This first reason actually leads to reason number 2, and that is that some of the world’s most powerful applications are built in JavaScript. If you’re wanting to become a developer then this is a great language to learn, and really there’s no way to get around working with JavaScript in some form or another if you plan on being a developer.

You don’t have to go far to find an application that was built using JavaScript. Popular applications such as Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook use JavaScript extensively. In fact, Google, which owns Gmail, and then Facebook have actually come up with their own JavaScript framework.

They took the JavaScript language and they built their own systems, their own layers on top of it, that make it possible for developers to build their own applications using JavaScript.

Moving on to reason number 3. If you happen to want to be building out mobile applications, then JavaScript is also a great language for you to learn. In the very early days of smartphone app development. You needed to learn all kinds of very challenging languages.

If you wanted to build out a smartphone app for iPhone, you needed to learn the Objective C language. If you wanted to build something for Android, you had to build in the Java programming language.

Well, through the years JavaScript developers took their own libraries and they built out these frameworks that allow you to build your application using nothing but JavaScript that ties in directly to your smartphone API.

That means you can build an application that can use the camera, that can check for location, that can use the accelerometer. All of the things that previously you needed to learn a completely different language for, JavaScript makes that possible.

My fourth and final reason is that JavaScript is one of the most powerful tools you can have in your arsenal to automate your day-to-day workflow. This is something that comes in really handy, even if you don’t want to be a developer.

You may not want to build the next Twitter or a mobile application. You may simply want to understand how JavaScript works. You may work in an office, and you have a number of busy work tasks. Well, JavaScript actually allows you to automate many of those.

Because JavaScript code can be run directly in the browser, you can perform tasks such as: if you imagine that you have a large web page that you go to, and you need to go and click a button a hundred times. Say you want to update and follow a bunch of people on Instagram or on Linkedin.

You can actually build a very simple JavaScript script that will run through and it will automate it. So instead of you having to go and manually click on follow and go with every single button, you can just write one script and then in a split second it can go and do all that work for you.

It’s great for working with automation. I hope that this has been a helpful overview for understanding why JavaScript is such a great language, and how you can personally use it in your day-to-day work.

You have developers that are self-taught, developers who went to a boot camp, and then you have developers who went through a more traditional approach. Where they went to a university, got a computer science degree, and then they learned development after that. You have all kinds of different ways that you can learn.

One of the common issues that I’ve heard from students through the years, is that they say they feel like if they’re learning from a boot camp experience or if they’re learning from online tutorials, it feels like they’re walking through tutorials and they know how to copy and paste what the instructor is telling them. Then afterwards if they were asked to build out a real application, they’d have no idea where to start.

That’s what I want to talk about in this guide. The topic of this tutorial is going “From copy and paste to comprehension”. The first thing that I want to say is that if you feel like you’re at a stage where you’re just copying and pasting code. So you are copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow, from tutorials, from anything like that. Do not worry.

That’s actually perfectly natural. That is a very natural stage of the learning process. I want you to first feel that that’s a normal. Someone like myself, or if you see any other developers, and you think that we just learned it magically, that is not the case.

If you feel like you’re just copying and pasting right now, and you’re not really understanding the concepts do not worry. That’s all part of the learning process. I want to take a look at a real world analogy.

This is something that happened with me years ago, and it helped me understand a little bit more about learning in general especially as it related to coding.

When I was growing up I did not have a real handy kind of experience. I couldn’t go and repair something in the house, I couldn’t repair sheet rock, I didn’t really have a kind of building experience whatsoever. I didn’t grow up in a family where that was prioritized.

I had no idea how to do anything really when it came to being handy around the house. Then I bought a house, this was in my mid 20s or so, and it needed to pretty much be redone completely from scratch.

My father-in-law was a very successful architect, and he walked through and he showed all of the different things that had to be done. It was like he was looking at the house, and he already saw what the end goal needed to be and all the steps that needed to be taken in order to get there.

I didn’t see it at all. What we did as a family is we just started rebuilding the house and started renovating it. Now I started with no knowledge of how to do that whatsoever.

What I would do is I’d be given some kind of task, it was usually pretty menial tasks, as they didn’t really trust me to very much which they shouldn’t. What they would do is my father-in-law would show me how to frame a wall, he would first do it himself, and then he told me to come over and do it.

I didn’t have any idea on any of the details. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know how foundations worked in the house, I didn’t know the way that electricity had to work, or the way the wall had to be formed. All I could do was watch him, see exactly what he did, and then go and try to duplicate that myself.

That’s how it started. That went on for months and months, and that entire time I still had very little knowledge on what was actually happening behind the scenes. What started to happen is the more time I spent remodeling that house, the more time that I spent practicing and following his example, all of a sudden things started to make sense.

I started to see how different parts of the house were all connected, and then I didn’t even need to follow him in step-by-step kind of approach. I’d still go ask him for advice many times, but I started to build up a mental model for understanding how it worked.

Now with coding, it’s the exact same thing. If you feel like you are in a stage where all you’re doing is you’re watching a screen cast, and three quarters of the things that they’re saying don’t even make sense, and you’re just following along.

Sometimes it’s hard to even follow along and you’ll make typos, and what ends up working on their screen doesn’t work on your screen. That is perfectly fine. That is exactly what happens in any kind of thing that you’re ever going to learn.

Just like it happened to me when I was learning how to remodel a house. It took time, and it also took a lot of repetition. What my main encouragement for you to be is:

1. Don’t get discouraged

If you feel like you’re not learning the underlying concepts right away, that will come. That comprehension will come. That’s a reason why this guide is called from copy and paste to comprehension. You’re not going to be able to build up that mental model right away. That is going to take time and it’s going to take repetition.

It’s the same reason why I recommend to all the students have gone through any of my courses that they need to be coding every single day. They need to be building out new applications, and learning the topics from different angles.

2. Watch Several Tutorials on topics you don’t understand

That also is something that I really try to encourage. If you watch a tutorial or you’re going to a boot camp and you hear one concept, and it doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s fine. Go and see several different tutorials from other instructors on that topic. Keep going until it makes sense.

There’s so many times where I’ve had a concept that I wanted to learn, and the first time I heard it it sounded like a foreign language to me. I’ve been doing this for over 15 years, and there are still things that make no sense to me the first time I hear them.

What I’ve learned what helps me out the very most is by going and hearing it from some other angle. I’ll go, and just say it’s a new feature in React, and I don’t understand it the first time I read it in the update. So then I’ll go watch a tutorial on someone who discussed that topic.

Maybe they gave an example, many times that example didn’t make any sense to me either. So I go and I hear it a third time, and sometimes a fourth and a fifth, and I keep going until it actually makes sense, until I can repeat it myself.

If that’s a stage where you’re in, where you feel like you’re just copying and pasting things, you’re not understanding the concepts. Do not worry. Do not lose heart. What you’re going to be able to do is be able to take those concepts, repeat them over and over again, and sooner or later they are going to start to make sense.

What I’ve found is that the very best developers, what really marks them is they refuse to give up. They will continue to repeat and to find out and discover new ways of learning things. They refuse to not understand a concept.

Make sure that that’s the attitude in the mindset that you have. That you don’t get discouraged when you hear something and it doesn’t make sense to you. If that was the way I lived, I would just live in depression all day every day.

Every single day I hear something that I’ve never heard before and it doesn’t make any sense. What my approach is, is if it doesn’t make sense the first time I just make sure that I dive deeper into it until I do start to build up that mental model and until it starts to make sense. That would be my top advice for you.

If you feel like you are locked into that stage where you don’t really understand the concepts yet, you’re simply going through and repeating what others are doing. That’s natural. That is the first step. My advice would be work through that go through it, repeat it, learn from other people who were discussing the same topics until it makes sense.

Then the one thing I will promise you is after you’ve done that, and you’ve done it enough times, you’ll look back at that concept that at first looked like a foreign language and didn’t make any sense to you. It’s all going to click, and you’re going to be surprised it took you that long to understand it in the first place.